Friday, April 27, 2007

Oh, go away.A dumb dwarf. Or is that politically
incorrect?

WHAT WE DO WITH THE
LITTLE PEOPLE. He was always a little man in a suit too big for
him. He's the guy who took copious notes without ever understanding the
meaning of the lecture. He's the guy who got the plum assignment by
working twice the hours his more talented competitors did. He's the guy
George W, Bush stands behind when everyone who has stood behind George
W. Bush is throwing up in the weeds because George W. Bush doesn't know
when or how to fire an idiot.

Alberto Gonzales is a mediocrity. And a gross incompetent. And one of
those pitiful little guys who always look like they've been dressed by
their mother.

I'm a right wing conservative Republican and I'd rather have Bobby
Kennedy running the Justice Department than this guy. What does that
tell you?

GWB -- Buy a goddamned biography of Napoleon. Not that it will help.
You've become the biggest disappointment of my life.

posted at
2:44 am
by
InstaPunk

Thursday, April 26, 2007

THINK
ABOUT IT. I know the lefties believe they're building up some
serious momentum on the Global Warming fad, but it's just not the
ticket to long-term ascendancy and power they think it is. Not because
the danger has been overstated, which it almost certainly has been. The
truth or falsity of the scientific claims is irrelevant to the question
of what political advantage the Democrats can wring from them. What
does matter is the elementary calculus of what makes a political issue
potent enough to create a sea change in the electorate, and in this
respect Global Warming couldn't be more of a loser for the party that
tries to parlay it into a mandate.

Strange that the party which constantly talks about "kitchen table"
issues could so entirely miss the fact that Global Warming isn't one of
them. The most basic fact about a kitchen table issue is that it's
something the electorate is experiencing right now. There's something that's
causing them pain or want in their day-to-day lives, or there's the
prospect of an immediate, achievable benefit in their day-to-day lives.
That's it.

FDR rode the Great Depression to a generation of Democrat power. He was
elected because the people were already suffering, a lot, and they
wanted a savior. He received a second mandate after Pearl Harbor,
because the people wanted revenge. Not the day before Pearl Harbor,
please note, because although the world political situation was equally
dire the day before, it wasn't hitting American kitchen tables and
therefore wasn't important enough to occasion real sacrifice.

Ronald Reagan rode economic stagflation to power. The people were
suffering 'right now' from 13 to 18 percent inflation they had endured
long enough to associate with out-of-control big government policies
and spending.

George W. Bush received a huge but short-lived mandate from the 9/11
attacks, because average Americans felt themselves under direct,
immediate threat from a frightening, alien enemy.

A huge majority of Americans signed up for the "Global War on Terror,"
which was described from the start (regardless of how people wish to
recast it now) as a painful struggle that could last for an entire
generation or more. But just a little more than five years after 9/11,
the immediacy of the fear has dissipated and "the people" want nothing
more to do with fighting terrorists. Do the Islamic jihadists hate us
any less? Have they abandoned their stated goal of destroying the west
and creating a medieval theocracy that rules through terror, murder,
and totalitarian oppression? No. But what have they done to us this
week? Not much. So the people would rather think about something else,
please.

And this is where the lefties have seriously bamboozled themselves.
People are prepared to be "alarmed" about Global Warming precisely
because it's so much less scary than murderous Islamofascist thugs who
maybe can't be stopped from doing their worst. The warming catastrophe
if it comes will take a long long time to reach the kitchen table, and
it sorta kinda (at the moment) sounds like the ones who will have to
pay for fixing it are all those rich, greedy corporations who are so
much fun to hate until they start laying off the people who sit at our
particular kitchen table.

But there's the rub. What happens to the appeal of Global Warming as an
energizing issue when the people discover there's absolutely no upside
to it? When they discover that the real 'vision' of the environmental
crusaders is to exact an accelerating series of sacrifices that will
hit the kitchen table damn quick -- higher fuel prices, frailer cars,
lower standard of living -- with absolutely no prospect of immediate
benefit other than some theoretical delay in a remote future disaster?

They're absolutely not going to buy it. They're already so fatigued
with the GWOT that they're ready to turn and walk away from a military
engagement with al qaeda that very few of them have sacrificed anything
to support. Why on earth would they persevere in an even longer term
cause that has yet to kill anyone when they finally realize that
they're being asked to give up a century of technological progress and
clean up after themselves like some Parris Island marine recruit?

When they find out how expensive it is to buy their electricity from
wind farms and heat their houses with solar panels, they'll just say
no. When you jack up their gas prices and impose SUV taxes to force
them into expensive hybrids that are slower, smaller, and uglier than
what they're driving now, they'll say "Hell no." And when you ask them
to recycle still more trash, surrender their air-conditioners, ration
their electrical usage, compost their own sewage, and become first
vegetarians, then Vegans, their answer will be unprintable. Most people
don't have the luxury of buying fictitious carbon indulgences just for
the sake of pretending they're saving a planet that not one of them
believes is in any serious danger from us, anyway. And if Kyoto or its
successor reawakens the beast of runaway inflation, there aren't enough
eco-platitudes in the universe to save the party in power frm the wrath
of the voters.

Of course, there are probably a good many liberals trying to ride the
Global Warming issue at the moment who know exactly how silly it all
is. If they don't, they're fools. If they do, they're corrupt
opportunists. Take your pick. If you still want to ride along with
them, you have a constitutional right to be as big a fool as you want
to be. But here's what you can take to the bank: the Europeans may be
braindead enough to let themselves be regulated back to the nineteenth
century or earlier, but Americans simply will not stand for it. And
five years from now, they'll be as oblivious about the dangers of
Global Warming as they are now about the several hundred million
Islamic fanatics who want to cut their throats today.

posted at
10:09 am
by
LocoPunk

Intervention

She's
in a deep dark place and needs our help.

THE O'REILLY FACTOR.
The lure of celebrity is a powerful thing. Once you get the
taste, it's apparently impossible not to want more. Famous people
invite you places, give you opportunities to do things you never
dreamed you were good at, and eventually you start believing you're
good at all kinds of things, including things you should absolutely
stay away from. That's when your friends should have the courage to
step up and say, "Stop it! At once!"

We don't blame Michelle Malkin for catching the celebrity bug. She's
hardworking, energetic, dedicated, and nice looking. Her blog is
justifiably popular because it's as fearless as she is and updated at
an almost frightening pace every day. She's become a regular guest on
Fox News and even a sometime guest host for that ultimate glory-seeking
publicity hound Bill O'Reilly. Her year-old multimedia blog HotAir has
become brazen enough to employ the O'Reillyian tactic of self-promoting
a FNC television gig for its own principal. So far so good. Nothing
wrong with being ambitious and self-confident.

But recent events are a cause for grave concern. Especially because
it's Michelle Malkin we're talking about here, who has been pitiless in
her contempt for Hollywood celebrities who think their popularity as
entertainers also means they are world-class intellectuals who should
lecture the rest of us about politics, values, and lifestyle. One of
Michelle's own colleagues, Laura Ingraham, has written a book about
such celebrities called "Shut Up and Sing." That's exactly opposite the
advice Michelle Malkin needs to hear from the rest of us as loudly and
insistently as necessary.

First, there was this very odd bit of performance art from HotAir the
other day:

Frankly, this struck us as an act of
masochism, almost of wanton self-destruction. We've empathized over the
years with the pain La Malkin has experienced from the filthy
imprecations of the soul-damaged denizens of the left. Why on earth
would she voluntarily open herself up to this
kind of attack? (and needless to say, this is the cleanest part...)

And what's a 40-year-old woman doing
with a schoolgirl outfit just lying around the house, anyhow? Or
is that something special you got after the twins were born when you
found Jesse's browser history pointing to a whole slew of porn websites?

No matter, regardless of where that outfit came from, I think that this
is as good a time as any to tell you this, honey. Displays like
this are not going to make people take you any more seriously. In
fact, it only reinforces our contention that you are basically
developmentally frozen at about an eighth grade level. Did
something really unspeakably awful happen to you when you were
13? Is that what retarded your emotional and cognitive
development?

Why set yourself up for such derision and abuse? Why? It makes no sense. Yes, you could argue that it's a one-time aberration. Everyone makes
mistakes. Except for today's HotAir entry. Which begins to seem like a
pattern.

It's true La Malkin went to Oberlin
College, where most everyone has musical talent. Obviously, her
talent in this respect consists of playing the piano. It's not singing.
IT'S NOT SINGING.

The people closest to her need to take her in hand. She has a problem.
It's time for an intervention. You can't be continually dancing on the
heads of Hollywood performers for talking about politics if you're a
political writer whose secret ambition is to be a performer yourself.
It's the kind of miscue that gets you laughed at. A lot.

Michelle. Please. STOP singing and dancing... and do the O'Reilly thing
you were born to do. Okay?

. God, how I
love this book cover. The sharp knowing eyes. The wry knowing smile.
The dark suit that is somehow an all-encompassing foreground and background. The grandiloquent,
allusive title that is nevertheless dwarfed by the name of the author.
It's perfect. How can it not remind us all of MacArthur's West Point
valedictory -- Me, Honor, Country?

Don't know how to break it you, all you boomer, X, Y, and XY
generations of the once great nation called the United States. It's
over. Today's Drudge item
is as perfectly emblematic as the cover:

"(T)he hardest part of all this has
been just listening to this for almost three years, listening to the
vice president go on "Meet the Press" on the fifth year [anniversary]
of 9/11 and say, 'Well, George Tenet said slam dunk' as if he needed me
to say 'slam dunk' to go to war with Iraq," he tells Pelley. "And you
listen to that and they never let it go. I mean, I became campaign
talk. I was a talking point. Oh, look at the idiot [who] told us and we
decided to go to war.' "

Boo. Hoo. He was the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency of the
United States of America. And we're supposed to feel sorry for him because he once made
a remark that became symbolic of the failure of his entire organization
to do its job for the people he was sworn to serve? Is there anyone out
there who believes that the thousands of anonymous intelligence
operatives who risked death and torture for their country in the
certain knowledge that their contributions and sufferings would never
be known by the public are somehow honored by this kind of narcissistic
self pity from the director of the
CIA? If a CIA agent is trained to die without any hope of rescue
or recognition, why in hell should a CIA director complain if his own
reputation is tarnished in the prosecution of American foreign policy
as the duly elected president conceives it?

But he's far from the only one. There has been a constant stream of
subversive, self-aggrandizing books by those whose whole power to serve
the U.S. government resided in their capacity to listen and speak
honestly to the President, whose confidence in their input rested
largely on the knowledge that candid conversations about matters of
state would not be spilled
into the public trough.

Thanks to the likes of George Tenet, Colin Powell, David Frum, Richard
Clarke, and God only knows how many other narcissistic crybabies, it
will never again be possible for a president of the United States to
converse with advisers without contemplating the self-serving books
they will write, and publish, while he (or she) is still in office.

Sorry. I can't forget what everyone else -- and I do mean everyone --
has forgotten. The United States of America is the most powerful and benevolent nation the world has
ever seen. The decisions that have to be made on behalf of our own
ctizens and the world are frequently difficult, complex, morally
contradictory, and nearly impossible to make. The leadership of no
other nation in history has ever voluntarily confronted the murderous
intentions of its rivals without permitting itself the option of
annihilating them by any means possible. Thus, the much pilloried Bush
adminsitration has continuously faced a situation without precedent in
human history -- fanatical, mortal enemies bent on the destruction of
the nation they serve, enemies who could be reduced to ash in
approximately 60 minutes without significant risk of retaliation, but
who will not be exterminated because we choose not to do so for moral
reasons.

The question that must be asked is why this heroic moral choice should
lead to the end of the most basic principles of loyalty, honor, and
integrity by those who have been so privileged as to participate in the
experiment.

The answer is apocalyptic. Such lofty expressions of merciful intent
lead inevitably to the lowest, most venal reactions by those who detect
the weakness inherent in mercy. They know they can get away with
personal treachery to further their own interests.

George W. Bush's real weakness is that he is not Hitler, Napoleon, Stalin,
Saddam, Castro, or Pol Pot. That he is far more like Portia than Caesar
is a promise of doom. In the days of Octavian, Powell, Tenet, Clarke,
and Frum would never have lived to write their whining memoirs about
their superiority to those from whom they took their orders. And the
citizens of the Republic would have been safer abroad as a result. But
there will be no American Augustus to lay the groundwork for a second
American Century. There will be, however, (count on it) an American
Cleopatra, Tiberius, Caligula, and Nero, and an inevitable sacking of
the capital of the world.

Rejoice, all you nihilists. Your fondest, deepest wish, the slashing of
your self-hating throats by oppressed barabarians, is one step closer
than it was yesterday. Happy?

Sure you are. It's called thanatos. The only spiritual abstraction you
can imagine...

Thanatos.
Jason Bourne without the doubts and inhibitions. Or the mercy.

Enjoy the ride, everyone. It will, of course, be televised. Cool.

posted at
4:37 pm
by
LocoPunk

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

.
Is anyone else tired of celebrities who insist the rest of us should
live like cavemen while they continue to sport around the world in
Gulfstream jets and hundred-foot yachts? Yesterday's proposal by Sheryl
Crow that we common folk should confine ourselves to a single square of
toilet paper was obviously ridiculous. Yet it proves why Global Warming
is such a perfect cause for idiot liberals. They love it to death
because they're convinced nothing can really be done about it, which
means that pious speeches and token gestures are all that's required to
demonstrate absolue moral superiority over the proles.

The Kyoto Treaty they claim to want wouldn't do a damned thing to undo
the catastrophe they predict for Global Warming -- except (further)
beggar the Third World and plunge the civilized world into permanent
economic depression. It's pretty safe to say no one is going to permit
that eventuality to happen, which enables the speechifying enviro-nazis
to go on shaking their heads and looking down on all the dimwits who
don't buy their vision of paradise. Wouldn't it be great if there were
something that really could
be done, something that would force the talkers to put up or shut up?

Yeah, but there really isn't
anything to be done. If the earth is warming, there's no practical way
to slash CO2 emissions to any significant degree. The talkers have
total license to keep on talking and trying to make the rest of us feel
small. Sheryl Crow is free to pretend that a goddess like herself
doesn't need more than a single square of paper to police her butt,
while us lowlier apelike humans need a handful. Point made. Perfect
celebrity posturing.

Or maybe not. What if there really was
something that could be done to slash CO2 emissions? Something more
substantive than walking around smelling like feces. Something us Great
Unwashed are better equipped to do than pansy liberals. How would that go down among the
self-congratulating illuminati?

The good news: there is such
a thing.

It's generally the oddest items of trivia that open up whole new
boulevards of thought. I followed an InstaPundit link one day last week
about
some current political tiff and accidentally scrolled past the referenced item to the
following intriguing sentence:

I don't like motorcycles, I don't like
outfits that proudly use the word "confederate," and I'm not sure you
are allowed to use the word "bitchin'" anymore--but this is a bitchin'-looking motorcycle. ...

The source is Mickey Kaus, who's a thoughtful and reasonable
commentator, delicately poised in the middle of the road for the
purpose of taking down the absurdities of both the extreme left and the
extreme right. The quoted sentence is a perfect
microcosm of his overall demeanor. Esthetically, he really is a
liberal. He enjoys debating his lefty professor pal Robert Wright
because Robert
is so damned smart and, well, superior to the oafs of the right. Kaus
probably goes to foreign film festivals for fun, and though he
disapproves of French political treacheries, he would most likely feel
more at home in Paris than in Biloxi, Mississippi. I don't know any of
this for a fact, and so I'm being hideously unfair, but if I had to
pick the car he drives, I'd guess a Volvo.

Why am I being so unfair? That opening statement: "I don't like
motorcycles." Wow. Not, "I'm afraid to ride a motorcycle," or "I think
motorcycles are unsafe at any speed," or "I find motorcycles on
the highway to be loud, unsettling, and annoying." No. We have a pure
value judgment here, which is actually equated with his disapproval of
any firms that would use the name "confederate." Which means that it's
an ideological thing, a class thing, an us vs. them thing. He probably
feels the same way about tattoos.

But there's also good stuff in Mickey Kaus. He has that old-timey
liberal open-mindedness which allows him to appreciate an attractive,
if alien, alternative esthetic. If he did
like motorcycles, he would like the one shown at the beginning of this
entry. It's called the Wraith, and it's manufactured by the Confederate Motor Company.
If he'd looked at the CMC site, he'd have discovered that the company's
marketing makes no use whatever of the Confederate flag. Even their
tee-shirts are beautifully understated.

Not their bikes, though:

The Wraith

It's a pretty raw thing, the Wraith. One seat. 410 lbs. 125 hp. 4.1
gallon fuel tank. No storage. Runs like a scalded cat. The company name
makes a certain kind of sense. One can't help being reminded of the
wild-ass CSA technology that launched the first-ever submarine used in
combat. Doomed, of course, like all Confederate plots, stratagems, and
acts of derring-do. Nathan Bedford Forrest would have ordered Wraiths
for all his crazed cavalry troopers. And he'd still have lost in the
end.

BUT the thing about the Wraith, the thing that struck me, is this. As
radical as it is, as impractical, as testosterone-overdosed as it
unquestionably is, I'd be willing to bet this bike still gets better
fuel economy than the next generation micro-car Green fanatics have
been salivating over since they first saw it in "The Da Vinci Code."

The
Zap! Smart Car. 40 mpg.

Yeah, I know. You libs and enviro-freaks probably think it's darling.
On the other hand, the average redneck looks at it and flashes on an
extremely unwelcome picture of John Bobbitt's truncated sex life.
That's
not an overreaction. That is
what you liberals have in mind for all of us, isn't it? Isn't
castration part of
your utopian dream? Of the phallic component in cars? Of the
white male patriarchy? Of the rampant predation of capitalism? Of the
male authority embodied in the Judeo-Christian evangelizing tradition?
Of course it is. There's really no other explanation for the
contradiction in terms your whole perspective on automobiles entails.

On the one hand, you bleat continuously about the need for absolute
safety, regardless of driver competence. You pore over crash test data.
(Volvos good. Yugos bad. Uuuuhhh.) You pass laws mandating airbags to
protect those of you who panic like teenage girls and abandon all
attempts to control the vehicle when an accident appears unavoidable.
Then you pass more laws mandating child seats that -- to protect them
from TA DAH! your mandated airbags -- turn parents into chauffeurs for
the back-seat emperors and empresses whose accessories have grown so
numerous and bulky as to require "minivans" to convey them from place
to place in royal comfort.

On the other hand, you wax so paranoid about "the planet" that your
most
fervent desire is to require the most advanced civilization in history
to abandon all the fruits of technology -- to turn out the lights that
freed people to read at night, to give up the warmth in winter and cool
in summer that freed people from their 40,000-year slavery to the
seasons, to reduce their individual lives to efficient units of energy
usage in the name of saving a planet whose natural forces dwarf, in
every conceivable respect, the mightiest accomplishments of the species
it is your pet project to hate.

You're such weenies you demand assurance that your stupidest driving
maneuver can't possibly kill you. And you're such loons that you
simultaneously insist on universal submission to tin-can vehicle
designs which will make you feel more divine by fantasizing the
vulnerability of a planet that will keep right on going whether you
live, die, or transmogrify into hermaphrodite lumps.

It's time to call your bluff. There's an easy way to cut vehicular CO2
emissions in half almost immediately. Outlaw cars. Starting right now.

From now on, we use motorcycles. Of the two- and three-wheeled variety.
Guess what? The common folk you despise so much are far better equipped
to deal with this transition than all you environmentally correct folk
who never saw a physical risk you wouldn't go miles out of your way to
avoid.

And no scoffing. It's completely do-able. The benefits to our "carbon
footprints" will be huge. We won't be able to carry as much stuff
around. There will, therefore, be less stuff. The inept and inattentive
will be more likely to get killed. We may wind up with fewer
professors, social workers, attorneys, witless adolescents, and
braindead bureaucrats. That aids evolution. But without all the giant
vehicles currently terrorizing our roadways and glutting our
interstates, averagely competent people will still be able to get
more-or-less safely from place to place, and we won't have to waste
petroleum and other pollutant resources in needless expansion of our
asphalt traffic arteries. There will be more incentive for people to
work from
home rather than doze through long commutes. Old people who shouldn't
be on the roadway won't be. Operating a motor vehicle will become, once
again, a skill rather than the automatic right of superannuated
children who don't know the difference between a clutch and a CD
player. Life will become exciting again. AND CO2 EMISSIONS WILL DECLINE
BY HALF, OR MORE THAN HALF, IN THE VERY FIRST YEAR. Just how badly do
you want to save this fragile little planet that's been so abused by
the machinations of mankind? Enough to show a little balls? That's
right. This is a test.

We've even prepared a substitution table that will show you exactly
what you'll be riding given what you're driving now.

If -- like most politicians and celebrities -- you blast from airport
to hotel in a black Cadillac Escondido (Escalero? Escamillo?
Escompoopoo?) or a fleet of them, here's your new ride:

Harley dresser.

Please remember to wear a helmet (it's
like gun control, a reassuring fiction), and don't be looking for an
automatic transmission.

If you're an academic weenie who just loves the safety record of the
Swedes and requires a vehicle that looks like a shoebox (Volvo) or the
shoe that comes in it (Saab), here's your new, much narrower carbon
footprint:

Husqvarna, the only Swedish
motorcycle.

But, hey, you were just about to upgrade
from that Volvo POS to a true liberal vehicle, like maybe a BMW. Here's
your contribution to Global Warming mitigation:

BMW 1200

I'm sorry. Does it look dangerous? No
place for your cellphone and your f***ing Ipod? Well, you're doing it
for the planet, a**hole. Get used to it.

Maybe you're one of those liberals who have solar panels on your 12,000
sq ft house and buy carbon credits to offset your 6 mpg Ferrari. Guess
what? Here's your new sports vehicle:

Ducati. 'Il Monstro.'

Are you a Marxist little liberal who's never been into 'things,' and
are quite happy putting around in your Prius or retro VW Bug? Sorry.
You're not immune. Even you have to cut your CO2 emissions in half. To
save the plant. You know. Here's your
new ride:

Honda Eterno. 80 mpg.

Of course, I know some of you are laughing. You're exempt. Because you
have kids. With a ton of Fisher-Price crap to haul around for the
little bastards. Well, throw away the Fisher-Price crap. Here's your
new minivan:

If you have more than two kids, you shouldn't. Too many carbon
footprints. Get Nancy to legalize retro-active environmentally friendly
abortion (RAEFA). It's for the planet, remember. Which will die
completely to death unless we save it.

But I forgot. Some of you are celebrities. Who need to cover vast
distances in order to sing about how everybody else must vut back on
toilet paper, electricity, and heat. You need stretch limos....

You need to haul your expensive sound equipment to the stadium...

And you need -- what was it?...

Three tractor trailers.

Four buses:

And six cars.

Truth is, we're ready, Sheryl. Millions of us who already know how to
ride these things. Millions of us who are dying to watch you wipe your
pampered ass on the pavement.

Are you ready?

The breadbasket of America is waiting.

Back when the warming started. She
used too many squares. Bitch.

All in all, it's a simple choice. Live to ride, people. Ride to live,
libs. Are
you listening, Sheryl?

posted at
3:16 pm
by
LocoPunk

Monday, April 23, 2007

. Yeah, it's a bad feeling, knowing that Global Warming is
going to drown New York and San Francisco and all the best concert
venues. The consequences are dire. At the very least it would mean
rewriting the list of terms,
conditions, and perks the band would have to extort expect from
promoters and producers. Think how much more complicated this
clause would get:

God, you've have to specify flying boats, barges, launches, and a cabin
cruiser, at a minimum. What's a girl to do?

That's why we understand her natural inclination to make suggestions.
But we can't help observing that she's thinking a bit small. No matter
how you perforate
slice it, her toilet
paper suggestion isn't going to save the concert-going public from
inundation by the melting of the polar icecaps. It wouldn't even shift
the balance if she issued the Luddite decree that ALL the mallrats of
the western hemisphere revert to the fresh corncob solution of the 19th
century (strangely practical when you figure in the fact that the Third
World will no longer have access to corn for food when it's all being
used for ethanol), or that women abandon disposable paper products for
the re-usable cotton towels that marked the high point of Roman female
hygiene.

But it was the best she could do. The amount of brainpower required to
write three-chord rock and rhyming iambic lyrics is not the same as
that required for saving the embattled earth from the sickening
depredations of post-Neanderthal primates.

Rescue is on the way. We know what to do. And if these additional shots
of Sheryl are any indication, she just might jump onto our admittedly
narrow bandwagon. Tomorrow.

She might turn out to be one
of the survivors. Unless... well, tune in tomorrow.

posted at
6:33 pm
by
LocoPunk

Friday, April 20, 2007

Old Thunder:

Shuteye TownThe back room at Moon Books in the
Shuteye Mall.

PREDICTIONS.
Back in the last century, InstaPunk contributor R.F. Laird wrote the
first truly multimedia work of fiction. Shuteye Town 1999 was a graphical
journey through an underground world built around a massive mall. The
work is much too large to summarize here -- 3,300+ graphic files,
350,000+ words of text -- but the reason we're remembering it today is
that one of its many themes was the catastrophe that's invisibly
overtaking our children. The influences on their development are
rendered in painful detail -- you can actually play the video game "Teacher Kill,"
for example, and you can surf the "UnderNet" until you go mad -- yet
the most troubling part of Shuteye Town is not its cartoon imagery, but
its prescience. It seems to know beforehand about the Virginia Tech
Massacre, and it even presumes to know why it happened. We can't
possibly show you all the ways this phenomenon is addressed in Shuteye Town 1999, but we can show
you a few. So that's what we're going to do.

The Shuteye Mall has a bookstore featuring representative titles and
parodies of bestsellers ranging from literary fiction to romance novels
to comic books. But there's also a back room containing the works that
can no longer be published in our free society. Our tour guide is the
very same Daniel Pangloss ("All is for the best in the best of all
possible worlds") highlighted in the last
InstaPunk entry. He's pleased by the absence of any books by "Angry
Young Men."

We'll get to some of the other books
later, but first let's take a subway ride to Schoolz Station.

And here's our destination.

Seems they've had an "unfortunate
incident" of their own.

So sad.

V-e-e-e-e-ry sad.

It kind of makes you wonder how the
college kids at Schoolz Station are reacting to the tragedy, doesn't
it? Well, they're coping. In their own way.

And if the girls on campus don't cooperate, there's always the option
of hooking up in some online chatroom.

But where were we? Oh yes. Why. Time to
return to the back room at Moon Books. Here's something in the
Unacceptable Viewpoints section.

The
Functional Sociopath

The Thesis

Item. An 18-year-old girl in
the company of adults sees a friend she has not spoken with for many
weeks. As they talk, she is reminded of a ‘funny thing’ concerning one
of her friends. The friend announced to several of her peers that she
was leaving for a weekend jaunt somewhere. Subsequently the friend is
not heard from again, although she had been a frequent caller by
telephone. Curious, a trio of her intimates visited her apartment about
two weeks after the ‘weekend jaunt’, found the door ajar, and entered.
There was no sign anyone had been inhabiting the apartment in the
previous two weeks. Nothing was missing, but a few things were
strangely broken. The trio left the apartment and went their separate
ways. None made any further inquiries. By the time the ‘funny thing’
was related as an anecdote, more than two months had elapsed since the
‘friend’ had been heard from.

This is just one of dozens of such items I have collected in recent
years. Not as spectacular as school shootings, they nevertheless have
in common with them an odd emotional discordancy. We regard it as
striking when a teenage boy responds to teasing by murdering a dozen of
his schoolmates, but isn’t it equally striking that ‘friends’ seem
unable to summon enough concern to investigate or sound the alarm when
an intimate simply disappears?

I believe that such discordancies are both striking and widespread. It
may be rare, thus far, for them to result in violence, but if my theory
about what is happening turns out to be correct, we will see far more
apparently inexplicable violence in the years to come.

What is my theory? I am convinced that what amounts to a system-wide
collapse in all our child-rearing institutions has created a virulent
new strain of personality disorder—one I call the functional sociopath.

A sociopath is a person without conscience and without deep emotional
connections to other human beings, individually and collectively.
Science has long sought an organic basis for this kind of pathology,
but it is also known that early environmental influences can play a
major role in shaping the sociopathic personality.

I am persuaded that we have, as a culture, established an accidental
combination of educational and child-rearing approaches which are
practically ideal for generating sociopathic personalities in otherwise
healthy children. To wit:

Self Esteem. The elevation of
self esteem as a principal, if not the cardinal, goal of elementary
education has dramatically reduced the opportunity for children to
experience the necessary pain of perceiving that the world outside of
themselves can and will make demands on them. This is a deprivation
which stunts the prime mechanism by which children grow from infantile
self absorption to fully individuated, ethical adult personalities. In
other words, the permissiveness that accompanies the emphasis on self
esteem aborts or sabotages the development of a real self of any kind.

Sorry for the bit at the end. It's called greeked text, which printers
(and some writers) use to represent the copy that's either not there or
doesn't need to be because we all know what it will say. Now, here's a
little something from the Invisible Problems section.

The End of Consciousness

The Thesis

In 1976, a Princeton psychologist named Julian Jaynes published a
breathtakingly novel theory about human development. Titled The Origin
of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Jaynes’s book
addressed a subject—human consciousness—which had been virtually
ignored by the formal discipline of psychology for most of the
twentieth century. His theory of consciousness was that the kind
of self-awareness we take for granted as an intrinsic attribute of
humanity is so dependent on the metaphoric properties of language that
it could not have existed prior to 1500 BC.

To clear the way for his most daring assertions, Jaynes laid down a
series of startling hypotheses about the nature of both mental
experience and human history. He argued persuasively that consciousness
is not necessary for most of the mental functions we use in daily life,
including memory, learning, and judgment. Consciousness is necessary
for decision-making, specifically for the imagining of possible
consequences of alternative courses of action.

Largely because of the very specialized role he inferred for
consciousness, Jaynes contended that individual self-awareness is not a
prerequisite for the development of highly structured civilizations. As
long as such civilizations operate in rigidly hierarchical
organi-zations, individual decision-making—and therefore
consciousness—is not necessary. Indeed, Jaynes suggested, it was
only the historical collapse of multiple civilizations in the
millennium before Christ which resulted in the kind of consciousness
associated with modern man. To put Jaynes’s point in the starkest
possible terms, it was not conscious man which produced civilization,
but civilization and its boom-and-bust cycles which produced conscious
man.

The reasoning behind this apparent reversal of cause and effect is
brilliant. Jaynes points out that consciousness is itself a highly
sophisticated metaphor; that is, an internal, mental analogue of the
external world. That analogue cannot be any more sophisticated
than the mental vehicles which are used to represent real experience
and real external phenomena. Since these consist primarily of words,
the depth and complexity of consciousness is governed by the depth and
complexity of the language that is employed to symbolize,
character-ize, and differentiate experience. And language acquires
abstract and subtle meanings only in response to the appearance in the
external world of complications and complexities which require new
words and connotations to express them.

Thus, there is—must be—a phase in the development of every language
when its words are merely names for things—rock, leg, buffalo, baby,
night, sun, rain. What concept of ‘self’ could be made out of such
basic naming conventions? If a speaker of the language has a name, that
name stands for the person who looks like him or her, not for a set of
accomplishments that can’t be listed during a period of time that can’t
be differentiated from ‘now’ by any man’s tongue.

It is not necessary here to replicate the entirety of Jaynes’s theory
or the compelling evidence he cites in support of it. Those who are so
disposed can find his work and explore it in depth. The bases which are
critical to this work have been established—the hypothetical primacy of
the relationship between language and consciousness, and between
consciousness and the cycles of human civilization. Other relevant
Jaynesian notions will be cited as appropriate in the context of this
book’s thesis, which can now be articulated.

The End of Consciousness

Individual human consciousness has served an indispensable role in the
creation of the highly advanced technological civilization we inhabit
today. But all cycles repeat to some degree, and there is now a
considerable body of evidence before us to suggest that individual
self-awareness is no longer necessary to the culture as a whole and is,
in fact, being ruthlessly exterminated by the behavior of the social
system as a whole, which has itself achieved consciousness by the same
process which produced it in Mankind.

The particular propositions entailed by this statement are as follows:

1. All organizations
and systems of which human beings are components do acquire and
maintain their own self-awareness—not figuratively but literally, in
that they are in part biological entities, possessing physical brains
of enormous size in the form of those portions of individual human
brains which serve as repositories for their rules, their values, and
their preferred models for decision-making.

2. In the course of its development, individual human
consciousness has been of continuing service to organizational and
system consciousnesses because none of these has had the authority or
power to function with complete autonomy. Always, individual human
awareness—with its highly flexible and adaptive decision-making
skills—was needed to arbitrate conflicts between competing
organizational and system consciousnesses.

3. Whatever human purpose has been served by
individual human consciousness in the past is irrelevant to the
question of whether it will be retained in an organization or system of
sufficiently large scale and scope. Whatever values attach to
organizational and systemic consciousness are oriented toward their own
growth and survival, not to the well being of Mankind per se.

4. The scope and scale of the worldwide
socio-economic system which is being continuously created by the
proliferation of computer technology and global business-nation
organizations has reached the point at which autonomy can be achieved
without further human assistance. Indeed, it will proceed more
efficiently without human interference. This does not imply the
elimination of Mankind, but rather its conversion to an operator
population of relatively affluent and healthy automatons.

5. The self-awareness of the worldwide system is
already a fait accompli, developed beyond the power of any individual
to fully comprehend or anticipate it. A corollary of this state of
affairs is that if any human being can even detect the existence of
this supra-consciousness, then its program of exterminating individual
human consciousness must already be far advanced; that is, advanced
beyond hope of our preventing or stopping it.

6. The evidence that individual human awareness is,
in fact, being progressively exterminated has become so obvious and
pervasive and incontrovertible that the universal human ignorance of
the accelerating process is the surest proof of its existence.

The remainder of this book is devoted to elaborating and elucidating
these six propositions and the central thesis they support. Arma
virumque cano...

Your patience is much appreciated. Here's your reward. It has nothing
to do with school shootings, but it is
a bestseller in Shuteye Town.

Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa
ille his arms went round her but she pushed him away and ran back to
the house through the rose garden, her breath coming in quick short
gasps. terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta and nothing happening
for quite a while. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.

Arma around her and this time she did not, could not have resisted
because it was page sixty, and she knew it was impossible to hold out
past page sixty. She wanted him, had wanted him ever since the moment
she first laid eyes on his handsome face and the virile shape of his
lean, male body inside those leathern breeches.

“Oh my darling dear,” he breathed, “I’ve wanted you ever since I first
saw your beautiful face and the womanly heaving shape of your, er,
maidenly form in that dress that’s cut down to here, if you know what I
mean.”

And then they didn’t speak. There was only the questing of their hands,
their lips, their hundreds of other nonsexual body parts, and finally
their things that stiffened or peaked or protuberated or moistened, and
they were joined together, as man to woman, and they rose and fell
together, as deeply and naturally as the ocean or as two dogs in the
street, except that the smell of tallow candles and leathern breeches
made it somehow sweeter, more refined, less dirty and disgusting than
it is in real life, and they sighed the words of love in the proper
dialect in each other’s ear, and kept on joining and rejoining and
rejoining some more until dawn, when both of them were exhausted with
love, but still not speaking because of the plot complication.